What Are the Grad Schools Teaching?
[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]
[A panel discussion with Jeremy Alexis (IIT), Shelley Evenson (UB), and Nancy Kaplan (CMU)]
IIT: The ID is a graduate only program with about one hundred students working on one of three programs. Once you are in the school there are three tracks. Communication and Product Design are self explanatory while Design Planning is more like the talk earlier today.
UB: Masters in Information Design and IA and an applied doctorate. Also two graduate certificates. Designed for working professionals. Sixty percent of students work full time. Since so many people don't have education in this field why is it important to foster graduate education in this discipline?
Should we have credentialing? This is something schools do. Schools can also do applied research that businesses won't do. The results are made widely available.
CMU: Two masters degrees and a phd program. Because they are at a big school they have loads of resources. The two degrees are in communication planning and interaction design. The program is two years long. Courses the first year are shared. The PhD can focus on any of the topics within the discipline. In HCI they incorporate CS, social science, psychology, and design. It is a one-year program. They also have an undergrad program in industrial design and communication. Many undergrads are now doing an accelerated masters degree.
MODERATOR: How are your schools ahead of the curve? What are you dealing with now that practitioners will deal with in a few years?
CMU: That's a marvelous question. The tale is that the schools are behind and instead they are ahead. We might be behind Europe in service design but we are making ground in the United States. Colleagues are doing great work in elder care and robotics. Getting out in the world and seeing how technology can be incorporated into people's lives. The way that they structure their project courses in the foundation year is in some ways ahead of practice. It helps prepare them for the way they will be working soon in the world. There's also the research topics but those are high level.
UB: The practice of participatory design is more alive in academic settings than in business settings. This notion that you go out and prototype before you define requirements. The other thing is specialized populations. The kinds of things that don't have clients yet but will have clients in the real world. Free to do things that don't have payoff on the bottom line.
IIT: ID bills itself as a methods based school and is constantly looking for new methods. Currently working on incentives design. What about the idea of integrating incentives to the UX process. Also looking into risk mitigation within organizations. How can design be applied to that goal? Exploring niches that design can work on. The ID is a testing lab for those new methods.
MODERATOR: Design has become so broad. How do you teach it in two years? What are you trying to get across? It could involve so many things, what do you try to impart in the two short years you have with students?
CMU: Try to help students gain framing so they can work with things in the future. The process for going through the foundation studio project is very rigid so all students can take that framing and innovate from there. You can't do everything in two years. What's nice about the foundation year followed by the thesis project they can find where they want to stand and concentrate on that in the second year. It's like eating your vegetables.
UB: Education is fundamentally different than training. It's about scaffolding for future development. Getting a PhD was getting a good license to learn. Similarly a masters degree is a license to learn. We are trying to teach them how to identify and frame a problem space. How to find prior solutions. How to identify tools and learn future tools. It's hard to define but when students come out they still have to learn best practices. The academic setting has a better handle on truth claims based on data. The academic setting is about the larger picture.
IIT: Critical thinking is one of the key elements. The three programs here all focus on that.
Q: Context is Georgia Tech HCI. What she noticed is that the designers graduate without hard skills. The higher level thinking is more of a senior role. Georgia Tech is making it hard to hire these people. They don't know the basic documentation and detail work.
UB: We teach people wireframes and deliverable and user research and contextual inquiry in the field. We don't just teach theory. We try not to get tool dependent but we do teach techne.
[stupid wifi dropped out so I lost some notes about mobile web questions]
Q: Design as saving people's lives and democracy and all those missed opportunities to apply the best and brightest minds to these fundamental challenges. In a commercial world it seems that the best minds don't get applied to these issues. As an industry what do we need to do to inspire people to do these projects?
IIT: Large project called bottom of the pyramid that is looking at creating tools for people living in rural China and rural India. This is a commercial enterprise but also serves people with real needs. It does not need to be purely altruistic. There are ways to make big organizations realize that there are opportunities in these markets. Overall this is a challenge. It is easier to go to a consulting firm.
UB: You can't tell students to go work for nothing. So will people volunteer their time to do good work in this arena. Open source has a role to play here.
CMU: It's hard for students who want to get for-profit jobs to show non-profit work and be taken seriously. This is a difficult challenge but some students do it and make it work.
Q: How did you get into the academic environment? How would professionals get into teaching?
IIT: Came through consulting and had spent time on the road. The director of ID invited him to go teach a few classes and he realized that the best day of the week was the day he was teaching. When a full time position came up he took it because it gave him the chance to think about long term problems.
CMU: Was a consultant for a long time. One thing at CMU is the Nurnberg (sp.) chair which is occupied by outside people for one year. Taught half face-to-face and half remotely. That experience was great and when the full time position came up she applied for it because she liked consulting but wanted to be able to bring that background to students.
Q: These programs had to start somewhere? Did they come from student demand? Consultant and professional demand? Faculty driven? A school near him doesn't serve his needs?
CMU: A committee from many departments and outsiders made it happen.
UB: Saw other schools doing things and pushed for it.
IIT: ID has always to some extent live under the shadow of the college of architecture since Mies and Nagy started it. The school needed to move out of the architecture building and worked to identify a niche. It was a way for the school to survive and flourish.
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